On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 02:16:38AM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote: > I wasn't aware of that but then I haven't been reading perl5-porters for a while > now. I don't know what smokes is but I assume it's a periodic test run of perl > on various platforms.
Yes, it's "smoke testing". H Merijn Brand wrote a harness script that lets a machine burn CPU trying various combinations of configuration options, and reporting whether any regression tests fail. Stating the obvious, but it lets you know very quickly whether a patch you created on one platform is actually portable to other platforms or other compilers. Given that perl builds on many architectures, and has many configuration options, but most developers are on Linux or FreeBSD using gcc this is a great help. Once you have several machines on different architectures, or with different compilers, the patterns of failures allow you to work out what's the actual cause of a problem. (eg which of architecture/compiler/configuration) I guess that sort of portability conformance testing isn't that much use to Cygwin. Then again, I know little about Cygwin or Windows, so possibly there are portability problems between compiler versions and Windows versions. Having lots of regression tests makes this useful, and I don't know what form, or how numerous, Cygwin's tests are. Related to this, one of the problems people have found with batch testing of perl on Windows systems is that SEGVs and other failures can cause windows to pop up some sort of dialogue box, causing the batch test system to stall. Nicholas Clark -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/